


stay awake

by pinkmoons



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, I guess???, Insomnia, Literal Sleeping Together, barely edited because we die like men, mentions of anxiety and trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:13:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24300397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkmoons/pseuds/pinkmoons
Summary: In which Zari can't sleep, John is caring, and the fabricator makes terrible chamomile tea.
Relationships: John Constantine/Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi
Comments: 18
Kudos: 84





	stay awake

**Author's Note:**

> you know the writers got me fucked up when it inspires me to actually write something. anyway i thought this was gonna be like 400 words and now i think it's over 1k so. whoops.

Through all the good, the bad, and the downright creepy that she has seen, Zari has never been a bad sleeper. She’s always prided herself on her ability to get the proper amount of beauty sleep no matter what, because there’s no way in _hell_ she would’ve ever let her fans see her with the shadow of a dark circle.

Except for tonight, apparently.

She’s been lying awake, staring at the ceiling for….three hours now? Four hours? An insufferable, frustratingly long amount of time to be doing nothing except thinking about every traumatic experience she’s had since she came aboard the Waverider and also not sleeping. The only thing that’s keeping her from going absolutely out of her mind is the rise and fall of John’s chest from where he’s asleep to the left of her, sprawled out half on top of her. If she didn’t not-so-secretly think it was cute, she would’ve thrown him off with the air totem an hour ago in hopes that it would get her to finally fall asleep.

John is somehow the opposite of Zari when it comes to sleeping. She’s never met anyone with such an erratic sleep pattern. He either does not sleep for days on end or he’ll sleep like the dead for fourteen hours straight, she realized a month into their relationship. Tonight is the latter, clearly.

She lasts maybe another twenty minutes of staring up at the ceiling, begging her body to fall asleep, begging her brain not to spiral into every bad memory she’s amassed lately, before she gives in. “John,” she whispers, trying to shake his shoulder as gently as possible. “Wake up.”

A pang of guilt fills her chest at the prospect of waking him up, but also, she cannot sit through another minute of this and she can’t get up to wander the ship in hopes of finding a fellow insomniac when he is pressed up against her so heavily. _“John!”_

He wakes with a start at that, and blinks slowly around the room a few times before he forces his head up. “Hm?” He squints in the dark to see her, and asks, “What’s wrong, love?”

“I can’t sleep,” she half-whines. He rolls off her to sit upright, and she uses her newfound freedom to cross her arms over her chest.

“So you decide to wake me up, then?” he teases, whispering something under his breath in another language that immediately lights up the lamp across the room, spilling soft light across the walls.

Zari pouts anyway and teases back, “Fine. Go back to sleep. You need your beauty sleep anyway,” even though she hopes he doesn’t.

“Nope.” He’s trying not to sound as groggy as he is. “I’m gonna keep you company.”

It fills her heart with warmth, and she bites back a smile. He doesn’t need the ego boost it would give him. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” After a beat of silence, he hums, and pushes a strand of hair behind her ear. “What’s keeping you awake?”

Zari tries, and fails, not to groan in response. The anxiety building up in her chest from all the thoughts creeping up on her, paired with the way her anxiety is building from trying to push them away so she can just sleep like her brain has been begging her for hours, is not exactly an ideal sleeping scenario.

When she explains it that way, John stops for a moment. She gives him a look that wordlessly tells him she does _not_ want to talk about that part of it this late at night when she is so tired, and he seems to take the hint, instead raising a questioning eyebrow. “Do you want me to put a sleeping spell on you?”

“No.” Zari reconsiders it the minute after she says it. “Well, maybe. I haven’t decided yet.”

She decides the answer is no, not even a minute later, after John tells her one of the potential side effects. Instead, she ends up walking zombified to the fabricator with him trailing behind her, where she gets Gideon to fabricate her some chamomile tea.

It tastes terrible—must be a side effect of the tea being created from thin air instead of a tea bag, she thinks. Or maybe Gideon is just awful at making tea. She drinks it anyway, wrinkling her nose up every time she tastes it on her tongue. The chair she’s sitting in at the table is cold underneath her, and John smirks at her from where he’s sitting from a few feet away. “Cold, love?”

“It’s fine,” she denies, crossing her arms in what is definitely not a way to keep warm.

Still, John scoots his chair closer to hers, throwing an arm around her shoulder wordlessly. His skin is always warm. Zari can’t help herself from leaning into it, pressing herself into his side and letting her head fall to rest on his shoulder once she takes the last sip of her (absolutely terrible) tea.

"This tea sucked," is all she can think to say to fill the albeit comfortable silence. 

He hums in response, and says, out of the blue, "D'you know what Gary did today?"

John has always been good at distracting her with his stories (among other more physical things), and dives into a very long, very drawn out story about the spell gone absolutely _wrong_ in every humorous way possible, until the tea hits Zari all at once and she finally feels as tired as John has been the entire time. Zari can see through his definitely-not-exhausted charade, and apparently, he can see through her, because he chuckles at her. “Alright, let’s get you to bed.”

“Okay,” Zari says, forcing herself up to her feet.

They stumble back into their bedroom, John magicking the lamp off before they fall into bed next to each other. Zari lets out a contended hum as she closes her eyes, her body finally feeling as ready for sleep as her brain has been for hours. As quietly as she can, she whispers in the dark, “John? Thank you for staying with me.”

He moves his body closer to hers, pressing a soft kiss to her lips, a wordless “you’re welcome.” It steals away the little bit of guilt she’s had in the back of her head since she decided to wake him up. Her body is warm, pressed against the warmth of his body and the feeling of the tea still warming the back of her throat. It’s nice, cozier than she’s felt in ages. Or maybe she’s just so tired that it’s more welcome than usual.

Neither of them manage to say “goodnight” before they fall asleep like that, legs tangling together, exhausted and hopelessly in love.


End file.
